5 Laziest Employees in The World

Everybody has experienced a dip in productivity at least once in their professional lives. It’s simply inevitable: after performing the same dull tasks from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, our inspiration runs dry, and our motivation throws itself out the seventh-floor window. And while some of us head over to the water cooler to get the latest office gossip or turn to awesome websites to waste time when that happens, there are a select few who take killing time at work to a whole new level by turning laziness into an art form.

1. Howard Dean

You’ve skipped work at least once – go on, admit it. We all have! Howard Dean, on the other hand, managed to skip work a total of 884 times – and didn’t get caught for 17 years.

Dean, the food services director at the Department of Correctional Services in New York, took “casual Friday” to a whole new level by taking every Friday off for 17 years, something that went unnoticed until his retirement in 2008. His three-day long weekends ended up costing the US government some $500,000 – $240,000 of which was spent on gas money and 75 bogus hotel stays.

2. William Morse

Matthew Coughlin Photography

Delivering mail can be quite physically demanding, so it’s best that you don’t apply for a job as a letter carrier if you get easily exhausted. But that never stopped William “Brent” Morse from getting a job with the US Postal Service in Kentucky, a job he had held for five years before he was arrested in March 2013 for failing to deliver mail.

Morse had seemingly wanted to shorten his route, so he ended up stashing almost 45,000 pieces of mail in his dead mother’s house and a rented storage unit. He was sentenced to six months in prison and a further six months’ home incarceration and was ordered to pay $14,808.01 in restitution to residents, a bank, and two local businesses for their losses.

3. Emmalee Bauer

When you have the inspiration to write, you write. But Sheraton Hotels sales coordinator in Iowa, Emmalee Bauer, was told not to use company time to write in her journal, an order that she obeyed. Except that she went on to use her work computer to pen a 300-page book on how boring her job was and on her efforts to avoid work.

“This typing thing seems to be doing the trick,” she wrote. “It just looks like I am hard at work on something very important…; I can shop online, play games and read message boards, and still get paid for it”. Unfortunately for Bauer, however, she was eventually discovered and fired on the spot and was later refused unemployment benefits.

4. Gary Pivoda and Louis Marciano

Quick! To the Man Cave!

As opposed to Dean, Office of General Services janitor Gary Pivoda and his supervisor Louis Marciano showed up for work every day. But that doesn’t mean they actually did any work; they simply smoked marijuana, watched TV, and played board games in their secret makeshift “man cave.” They even used their state-provided car to deliver drugs to other state employees.

They are both banned from ever working for the state again and were collectively ordered to pay over $3,000 in restitution. Pivoda was charged with defrauding the US government and served a year in prison in 2009 while Marciano was sentenced to five years’ probation and 250 hours’ community work.

5. Ray Brent Marsh

This is definitely the most disturbing case of lazing around on the job, ever.

Ray Brent Marsh took over his father’s crematorium business in LaFayette, Georgia in mid-1996 after Marsh Sr.’s health started deteriorating. Between 1996 and up until 2002, Marsh had received over 2,000 bodies for cremation – at least 339 of which, however, were never cremated and were instead dumped on the crematorium’s site because, apparently, the cremation oven was “broken”…; even though it was in working order when it was tested.

Beginning in October 2000, the Walker County Sheriff’s Office began receiving reports of scattered bodies and body parts around the Tri-State Crematory – piles of rotting flesh were discovered in a storage shed and vaults in February 2002 –and in nearby woods and buildings.

Marsh faced a sentence of thousands of years in prison and pleaded guilty in 2004 to 787 counts of criminal violations, including deception, abusing a corpse (that just sounds wrong), and burial service-related fraud.